Thomas Friedman: How could more people be feeling 'un-free'?

THOMAS FRIEDMAN

Published 3:24 pm, Saturday, August 23, 2014

The United States is swamped by refugee children from collapsing Central American countries; efforts to contain the major Ebola outbreak in West Africa are straining governments there; jihadists have carved out a bloodthirsty caliphate inside Iraq and Syria; after having already eaten Crimea, Russia keeps taking more bites out of Ukraine; and the U.N.'s refugee agency just announced that "the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-World War II era, exceeded 50 million people." If it feels as though the world of disorder is expanding against the world of order, it's not your imagination. There's an unfortunate logic to it.

Three big trends are converging. The first is what one of my teachers, Dov Seidman, calls the growing number of "un-free" people in the world — the millions who "have secured a certain kind of freedom but yet feel un-free because they're now aware that they don't have the kind of freedom that matters most."

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Seidman, chief executive of LRN, which advises global businesses on governance, points out that while there's been a lot of warranted focus on the destabilizing effects of income inequality, there is another equally destabilizing inequality emerging at the same time: "It is the inequality of freedom, and it is even more disordering."

That may sound odd. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of dictators in the Arab awakening, how could more people be feeling "un-free"?

Seidman looks at the world through the framework of "freedom from" and "freedom to." In recent years, he argues, "more people than ever have secured their 'freedom from' different autocrats in different countries." Ukrainians, Tunisians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis to name a few. "But so few are getting the freedom we truly cherish," he adds. "And that is not just 'freedom from.' It is 'freedom to.'"

"Protecting and enabling all of those freedoms," says Seidman, "requires the kind of laws, rules, norms, mutual trust and institutions that can only be built upon shared values and by people who believe they are on a journey of progress and prosperity together."

Such values-based legal systems and institutions are just what so many societies have failed to build after overthrowing their autocrats. That's why the world today can be divided into three kinds of spaces: countries with what Seidman calls "sustainable order," or order based on shared values, stable institutions and consensual politics; countries with imposed order - or order based on an iron-fisted, top-down leadership, or propped-up by oil money, or combinations of both, but no real shared values or institutions; and, finally, whole regions of disorder, such as Iraq, Syria, Central America and growing swaths of Central and North Africa, where there is neither an iron fist from above nor shared values from below to hold states together anymore.

Imposed order, says Seidman, "depends on having power over people and formal authority to coerce allegiance and compel obedience," but both are much harder to sustain today in an age of increasingly empowered, informed and connected citizens and employees who can easily connect and collaborate to cast off authority they deem illegitimate.

"Exerting formal power over people," he adds, "is getting more and more elusive and expensive" — either in the number of people you have to kill or jail or the amount of money you have to spend to anesthetize your people into submission or indifference -— "and ultimately it is not sustainable." The only power that will be sustainable in a world where more people have "freedom from," argues Seidman, "is power based on leading in a two-way conversation with people, power that is built on moral authority that inspires constructive citizenship and creates the context for 'freedom to.'"

But because generating such sustainable leadership and institutions is hard and takes time, we have a lot more disorderly vacuums in the world today - where people have won "freedom from" without building "freedom to."

The biggest challenge for the world of order today is collaborating to contain these vacuums and fill them with order. That is what President Barack Obama is trying to do in Iraq, by demanding Iraqis build a sustainable inclusive government in tandem with any U.S. military action against the jihadists there.

But "building" is so much harder than "containing." It takes so much more energy and resources. Preserving and expanding the world of sustainable order is the leadership challenge of our time.